This year marked a return to an in-person event and hundreds packed into the beautifully decorated main room in the City Hall for a sit-down three-course meal, with the winners being announced periodically throughout.
Elena Rotzokou makes the case against exams as a mode of assessment, pointing towards their arbitrariness as well as the negative impacts of their all-or-nothing nature. Rotzokou claims that the unhealthy logic of exams cannot be disentangled from capitalist and neoliberal thinking.
"If the structure of undergraduate life then had such adverse outcomes and is so worthy of condemnation – and the structure fundamentally hasn’t changed – what does that imply for Oxford now?"
"The end of doomer politics will require the ideal scenario of regime change, and then that the West actually demonstrate to Russians that there is a workable alternative to the way their country is run."
"I don’t view myself as particularly underprivileged at home, I’m just a normal person, but when i get here, these are the people who have aspirations to be MPs, policy advisors, involved in powerful institutions, to run the country… but they’ve never met a person who comes from a family in the North, whose family income is less than the national average. That’s what scares me.”